Friday, November 11, 2005
11th, 11th, 11th ... Veterans Day
Originally Armistice Day, commemorating the cessation of hostilities in the Great War, Veterans Day was renamed after World War II to honor those who fought in all of the nation’s wars. In contrast to many other federal holidays, it remains fixed to this day’s date instead of moving each year to a convenient Monday. The resonance of “11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month”, the exact time and day of the signing of the WWI ceasefire in a railroad car near Compiègne, France, somehow remains powerful enough to withstand the pressure for creating three-day weekends.
I’ve been at the blogging game long enough to have written two previous Veterans Day entries. In 2003, I discussed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial ("The Wall") in Washington DC, and my deep and wrenching reactions to it. Last year, I decried what I called Dubya’s Folly, marveled with disgust that its miserable failure hadn’t sufficed to throw him out of office, and pledged to continue the difficult task of opposing the malAdministration and its policies.
In those previous Veterans Day essays, I made note of our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers who have made the ultimate, final sacrifice in the name of this pointless and criminal operation. Two years ago, my remark was that “several hundred” had died; last year, I (mis?)counted 756 deaths in the year since my previous essay. This year, after careful examination of the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count website, I have a better, and better-defined, count of casualties between Veterans Days. Counting each November 11 as the end of the time period, 403 US servicemen and servicewomen died between the start of Bush’s invasion and Veterans Day of 2003. In the year between the 2003 and 2004 Veterans Days, the corrected count is 774 additional deaths.
In the 365 days between November 12, 2004 and November 11, 2005, the number of American Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force personnel killed in Iraq is 883. That’s an average of 2.42 people per day. A death every 9.9 hours, every 595 minutes. Two and a half years after “Mission Accomplished”, the mortality rate of American GIs continues to rise.
To George W. Bush: If you happen to read this blog entry, every single one of those deaths is your fault, your responsibility, your onus.
